I am a Quest noob, having a problem. I created a room with a table in it. There is a paper on the table. I want the paper to be invisible and unavailable until after the table has been examined.

For the paper, I have checked off "invisible" and "unavailable" on interactions tab.

For the table, I run a script when the table is examined. It prints a message, reveals the paper, and makes the paper accessable.

When I test the game, I examine the table and the paper is revealed. But when I try to look at the paper, it says "I can't see that here".

What have I missed?

Thanks.

It sounds like you only really need to make the paper inaccessible - this will also hide it from the room description, so you don't need to set it as invisible as well.

This shouldn't be stopping your ASL file from working though. If you email it to me then I can take a look into it for you.

Alex, I emailed the ASL to you. Thanks for your help.

Thanks. This appears to be an issue with Alan Bampton's Q3EXT library - if you don't include it, the code works properly.

Yes!!! I would have never figured that out. Somewhere I picked up an instruction to include that library - I don't remember where. Being new to this I blindly followed the advice not knowing its benefit or consequences. As I learn more it'll hopefully fall into place.

Thank you so much for your help.

I understood exactly where you were going there. In my game, Get Out Of The House, I have a puzzle that works exactly as your table and paper scenario. It involves examining a closet that reveals more items.

I'm glad Alex helped you so quickly (after all, he designed Quest) and I wish you luck in your game.

Steve the gaming guy

Hi guys

To anyone else who's using Q3Ext.qlb - PLEASE download the replacement "typelib.qlb" from my website and use that instead! It's a much better lib and more importantly a lot easier to use than Q3EXT ever was!

Note - using these libs does add a bit of complication in some areas and it won't always be immediately obvious what needs changing to make the combination of regular Quest & my libs do exactly what you want.

Al (MaDbRiT)

I think this is a good opportunity to raise this:
Why doesn't Quest come with TypeLib, not Q3Ext? Then we wouldn't have these sorts of problems.

Why doesn't Quest come with TypeLib, not Q3Ext? Then we wouldn't have these sorts of problems

Because Q3EXT was released as a finished lib and isn't ever going to change now - there may be a few uncompiled games out there that actually use it - Alex chooses to distribute the 'last known version' of Q3EXT with Quest.

This means anyone who downloads Quest then a game that happens to require q3ext - they will automatically have the correct version, this is eminently sensible.

typelib is a bit different in that I'm still calling it a "beta" (i.e. it is unfinished) and I'm recommending that people should not use it unless they are going to compile the finished game that results. If a game using typelib is compiled then a local copy of typelib isn't needed at all - so there's no need to pack it with Quest. This means there is no chance of getting into a 'you need version 1.006 and you've only 1.004' scenario for game players who may well not understand the issues of library compatibility!

Al (MaDbRiT)

This frees me to improve typelib without having to worry too much about providing backward compatibility checks etc